TUESDAY TUNES | JONI MITCHELL | WOODSTOCK

— J u k e b o x —
JONI MITCHELL
W O O D S T O C K

“We are stardust, Billion year old carbon.We are golden.Caught in the devil’s bargain”
Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Canada. At the age of 9, Mitchell contracted polio, and it was during her recovery in the hospital that she began performing and singing to patients. After teaching herself how to play the guitar, she went off to art college and quickly emerged as one of the leading folk performers of the late 1960s and ’70s.
She moved to the United States in the mid-1960s, and in 1968, she recorded her first album, Joni Mitchell, produced by David Crosby.

Portrait of Canadian musician Joni Mitchell November 1968.
From a photo shoot for Vogue. Photo by Jack Robinson/Getty Images

Joni Mitchell wrote the song from what she had heard from then-boyfriend, Graham Nash, about the Woodstock Music and Art Festival.
She had not been there herself, since she was told by a manager that it would be more advantageous for her to appear on ‘The Dick Cavett Show’. She wrote it in a hotel room in New York City, watching televised reports of the festival.“The deprivation of not being able to go provided me with an intense angle on Woodstock,” she told an interviewer shortly after the event.
David Crosby, interviewed for the documentary ‘Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind,’ stated that Mitchell had captured the feeling and importance of the Woodstock festival better than anyone who had been there.

‘Woodstock Lyrics’

I came upon a child of GodHe was walking along the roadAnd I asked him, where are you goingAnd this he told me…I’m going on down to Yasgur’s farmI’m going to join in a rock ‘n’ roll bandI’m going to camp out on the landI’m gonna try and get my soul free

We are stardustWe are goldenAnd we’ve got to get ourselvesBack to the garden

Then can I walk beside youI have come here to lose the smogAnd I feel to be a cog in something turningWell maybe it is just the time of yearOr maybe it’s the time of manI don’t know who l amBut ya know life is for learning

By the time we got to Woodstock, We were half a million strong And Everywhere there was song and celebration.

And I dreamed I saw the bombers Riding shotgun in the sky, And they were turning into butterflies Above our nation.

We are stardust. Billion year old carbon. We are golden.. Caught in the devil’s bargain And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

November 1968: Portrait of musician Joni Mitchell. From a photo shoot for Vogue. Photo by Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

To learn more about Joni Mitchell and her Woodstock experience check out the video interview’s with CBC here